Email Subscription

Surreal or absurd? Kafka? It must be the English major in me, praying for order in chaos. Except this is real life:

Watching the public execution of his mother and older brother, Shin Dong-Hyuk thought the punishment was just. They had planned to escape the North Korean labor camp they were being held in until Shin overheard them and reported them to the prison guards.

Just 14-years old, Shin says he felt no guilt in condemning them to death. One of the very few North Koreans to be born inside one of the brutal prison camps, he says the concept of family that exists in the outside world did not exist in Camp 14.

“I had never felt that kind of attachment and love that people outside of prison camps feel towards them,” he told CNN. “So they were just one of many criminals in a prison camp.”

Can you call that life? That a 14 year-old cannot distinguish familial connections?

Maybe I should stick to fiction. It’s less unsettling than the news. Hitler was apparently more humane than the North Koreans:

“It was like Hitler’s Auschwitz concentration camp, not as large and there is a difference in the way people are killed. Hitler gassed people, Kim Jong Il sucked the life out of people through starvation and forced labor.”